Gravatamatic

This blog now runs on Statamic – a fine CMS which takes a nodb approach to storage.

It’s a young CMS, so unlike #eecms or #wordpress there aren’t a whole sea of extensions out there. You have to scratch your own itch a lot. That’s part of the fun. At the moment (October 2012) there isn’t any developer documentation for add ons to speak of, so it’s a case of scouring github for examples and working from there to figure out the shape a plugin takes.

I came across my first need to build an addon tonight while playing with the template for this site. I needed an avatar. So I needed a gravatar. So I needed to calculate an md5 from an email address. So I needed an add on. A quick Google for ‘gravatar statamic’ found nothing.

About 15 minutes later and bingo, this little snippet…

{ { gravatamatic:quicky email="{ { contact_email }}" }}

… is producing a perfect gravatar:

" }}

It’s a trivially simple addon – but it shows the simplicity of the Statamic approach that you can go from zero to working implementation in just a few minutes. Relatively little scaffolding nonsense to contend with, and intuitive structure, straight to the point.

The source is up on github, along with the docs if you might find it handy.